News – Category: Review

Arguably the most influential recordings in the history of jazz, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens were the occasion for three Jazz at Lincoln Center concerts in the Rose Theater, Sept. 28-30, featuring Wynton Marsalis and eight other musicians. As my first visit to New York in several years and my first chance to see the new digs of Jazz at Lincoln Center, I made a point of catching the Saturday night performance which, like the other two, bore the title: “Wynton and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives.”
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The coolest shindig in town Wednesday night had to be Wynton Marsalis’s 46th birthday concert. About 1,050 Victorians celebrated with the most famous jazz trumpeter alive, joining his quintet to sing Happy Birthday to the boss.
Marsalis, natty in a tan three-piece suit, got into the fun himself on this unplanned encore with a solo spanning buttery bop flurries and echoes of Dixieland. Then, after offering a few notes to the audience sitting stage right, the trumpeter—seeming both pleased and faintly embarrassed—strolled off.
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“When I tell you something,” said jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, wearing a suit and tie Saturday afternoon at the Paramount Theatre, “it’s with love, like you were my own son or daughter. Don’t take it as negative, but I am going to tell you something.”
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“If I see something and you see something, it’s there,” explained trumpeter Wynton Marsalis Saturday, during his richly satisfying show at the Paramount Theatre. “And if it’s there, we’re both there, too. So there’s no ‘they.’ That’s why [this tune] is called ‘Find Me.’ “
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In the recorded literature of jazz — and of American music, really — there is no greater document than the stack of three-minute sides made by Louis Armstrong for the OKeh label in the mid- to late 1920’s. Leading two successive bands billed as his Hot Five (and, briefly, a Hot Seven), Armstrong delivered a series of performances bursting with bravura and invention, in the process introducing a heroic new language of improvisation.
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Jazz at Lincoln Center began its new season on Thursday with the first of three nights devoted to the music of John Coltrane. The occasion doubled as an early celebration of what would have been Coltrane’s 80th birthday (Sept. 23) — cake was served during intermission — and an opening salvo for the organization’s third year of programming in Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle. It was a success on both counts.
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Early in the course of “Brilliant Corners,” the 92nd Street Y’s concert of Thelonious Monk’s music on Thursday night, the pianist Bill Charlap offered a succinct appreciation of Monk’s singular place in jazz. “He was a revolutionary within a revolution,” Mr. Charlap said. The revolution, he went on to explain, was bebop, which Monk helped foment but never fully embraced.
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The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis fulfilled his promise and returned last night to the International Festival of Jazz in Vitoria to complete and premier exclusively a work dedicated to the city, his personal tribute to the city was rewarded with a statue commemorating the first ever Pulitzer Prize in Jazz.
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Wynton Marsalis has composed a number of extended works during his tenure as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, usually with the stated ambition of capturing some aspect of the African-American experience. On Thursday night at the Rose Theater, he conducted his latest such effort, “Congo Square,” featuring the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and Odadaa!, a nine-piece Ghanaian percussion and vocal troupe.
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